Musings on theology, technology, family and whatever strikes my interest, from a onetime theologian and occasional CTO.

Monday, August 6, 2007

Pathetic

I just watched the video of the Defcon 15 "outing" of reporter Michele Madigan. Wow. I didn't know one conference room could hold so many pathetic, hypocritical, self-righteous losers. Listening to the socially challenged Defcon attendees hooting and hollering insults at her as she tried to make it out the door made me sorry to be a geek. I'm well aware that folks of this sort are, shall we say, narrow in their focus – but it still stuns me that nobody in a conference room full of black-hat hackers could fail to spot the irony in all that rhetoric about "trust".

I think deconstructionism can sometimes be a useful tool in pointing out the self-contradictory assumptions in a given position, though I'm not a fan of it as an overriding philosophy. But in this case, you really don't need anything as subtle as Derrida to point out that outrage over the violation of black-hat hacker trust is just ever-so-slightly problematic.

Michele, I doubt you'll ever read this, but here's my apologies. We're not all like that.

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I should make sure everyone knows that although I sometimes refer to the companies where I've worked, this is my own personal blog. This means that the opinions expressed in it are entirely mine, and should not be taken as representative of my company's official position on anything.